Skill Flow Builder Story Debugger

Warning DEPRECATED The Alexa Games team will no longer support or maintain this official distribution of Skill Flow Builder. Thank you to all the folks who have used SFB to make great Alexa skills over the years!

The Skill Flow Builder Story Debugger. This module enables you to simulate your project’s behavior through the command line by running the SFB content locally, rather than calling a deployed skill over the network.

Visit Skill Flow Builder on Github for more information.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

The following needs to be installed and configured:

Node.js (with npm) # Note: Requires Node.js version >= 10.15.
Yarn

This module can be interacted through the sfb-cli/ package. If you have the sfb-cli/ globally installed, you can then run alexa-sfb simulate <storyName> to interact with the debugger. If you do not have the sfb-cli/ already installed, please refer to the sfb-cli installation process to get started.

Compiling

yarn install && yarn compile

The compiled code is built into the dist/ directory. This package requires other core modules to be built. To build all the modules in the packages/ directory at once, run yarn build-modules.

Testing

yarn test

This will run all unit tests in the test/ directory.

Package Structure

The SFB Story Debugger package structure looks like this.

packages/sfb-story-debugger/
└── test/ # Tests
└── index.ts # Logic for the simulator
└── ...

Contributing

The SFB Story Debugger enables you to test your story without deploying through the alexa-sfb command line tool’s simulate command. You can locally recompile the source code with yarn compile, but you will have to run yarn build-modules in order for your changes to show appropriately in other modules.

Two functions of note are run and runCommand. run is the entry point for launching the SFB story debugger, while runCommand handles the different commands being called in the story debugger. For example, the handling of different commands in runCommand looks like:

let command: string = commandMatch[1].toLowerCase();

switch(commandMatch):
    case "relaunch":
        ...
    case "get":
        ...
    case "set":
        ...

Adding new commands would involve setting a new case statement, as well as including any needed code along with it.